Christopher Barzak

Category: Literature

  • The Birthday of Birds and Birthdays

    Birds and Birthdays has officially released into the wild.  It’s been available directly from the publisher for the past couple of weeks, but will be appearing in other marketplaces now, like Amazon.com (where they say it’ll take 1 to 3 weeks to get the book, but that’s only because they’ve just recently placed orders for stock with the publisher…

  • Andre Norton Award Jury Duty

    While I already announced this on Facebook and Twitter , I thought I should mention it here on my blog, too, in case someone out there doesn’t keep up with my doings in the socializing networkings of the internet. I’ll be serving as a juror for the 2012 Andre Norton Award, which honors outstanding science fiction and…

  • Attack of the Killer Collections

    Every year around this season of gift giving, I see lots of posts by writers and readers and online stores, advising people what books would make great gifts.  Usually, these lists consist entirely of novels.  I’m a big fan of novels, but I might be an even bigger fan of short story collections.  But even…

  • A free read of Map of Seventeen

    I’ve posted my Nebula nominated story “Map of Seventeen” on my website for interested readers.  You can find it on the page tabs overhead.  I’ll take it down soon after the Nebulas, around the end of May, but here it is for a limited time for free.  If you like it, please drop me a…

  • Another piece of the map

    For those of you who may have read the vignettes in Map for a Forgotten Valley that I published last month, another piece of that map has recently been published by Muse, a Cleveland magazine.  You can read the whole issue of Muse by visiting their website and downloading the pdf of the issue.  Along…

  • Fall Recap

    The end of autumn.  It’s been a busy semester.  The student group I advise has created an awesome new online literary magazine called “jenny”.  I posted about this a little over a month ago, and now the site is live.  We had a launch party with over a hundred people in attendance at Dorian Books…

  • Introducing “jenny”

    “jenny” is something my students in the Literary Arts Association at YSU have been busily preparing as a new online literary magazine.  This is a radically energetic and creative group of students, and I’m really proud to be working with them as they put together something new and electric like this.  Please take a look…

  • Older eyes

    My last class for my MFA program at Chatham starts tomorrow. It’s a Multi-Genre Creative Writing Workshop, which means the participants can submit things from any genre, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays, etc, for the workshop to consider. There’s me and one other fiction writer in the class, one nonfiction writer, and three poets, I believe.…

  • Reality Hunger

    I’m reading David Shields’ new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.  It’s a really engaging nonlinear, non narrative, at times lyrical essay, always structured by way of collage or mosaic, appropriating snippets of ideas from other writers, thinkers, poets, and philosophers and critics, arranging in a mash-up style, voices layered over one another without attribution (until…

  • YA before YA was cool

    Last week the famous J.D. Salinger passed away, which lead to an internet riot of people either mourning–some respectfully, some deeply–or people taking pot shots at Salinger and his most famous character, Holden Caulfield. The funny thing is, most of the people commenting on the book really don’t know anything about how the book was…